The Patt Junction Bus bombing, carried out by Hamas in Jerusalem on June 18, 2002, was a suicide bombing on an Egged bus that killed 19 people and injured 74 more. Seventeen of the dead were residents of the Gilo area, including high school students on their way to school.
At 7:50 a.m. on June 18, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber from Bethlehem boarded the Egged Line 32A bus from the Gilo district. Shortly thereafter, when the bus stopped in Beit Safafa, an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem, the bomb exploded from the front of the bus. His bomb belt contained metal balls for shrapnel in order to maximize casualties.
The Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas issued a statement about the attack. The suicide bomber was identified as Muhammad al-Ghawl Hazzar, a 22-year-old student of Islamic law at An-Najah National University in Nablus. He had a nail-packed explosive device strapped to his body and boarded a bus during the morning rush hour as schoolchildren and commuters passed by on their way from Gilo to central Jerusalem. The explosion lifted the bus off the ground, ripped off its roof, and sent bodies flying out the windows. Two residents of Jabel Mukaber, a suburb of East Jerusalem, were tried and convicted of transporting a suicide bomber.On June 30, Israeli soldiers killed Muhanid Taher, a senior Hamas bomb maker, during a raid on a commando in Nablus. According to Israel, he was the man behind this and other attacks.
The charred remains of the bus were shipped to the United States under the leadership of Zaka, an Israeli rescue and body-recovery group, to be displayed at the biennial Jewish Expo Fair in New York. Zaka works with volunteers to scrape up bits of blood and flesh from bomb sites and bury them in accordance with Jewish law. Zakah aimed to raise awareness of their work and to show the impact of suicide bombers.
Muhammad al-Ghawl, a suicide bomber, said, "How wonderful it is that the fragments of my bombs kill my enemies and die myself. Not because I want to kill, but because I want the Palestinians to live like any other people. They die for the sake of the next generation. If God wills, injustice will disappear and victory will be ours. He stated in his suicide note three days ago. In Islam, fighting as a martyr, sacrificing oneself for God, is celebrated as jihad (holy war). The Palestinians considered it a righteous holy war to kill the Israelis who hunt them down with injustice from the religious New Year of giving their lives. Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, who inspected the scene, declared that he would "fight Palestinian terrorism by all means," and launched a massive Palestinian invasion of the West Bank from midnight on June 18, 2002.
